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As you may have guessed by the absence of performance reports, Operation Dunk 2010 was stalled for a bit. I allowed the demands of work and family to get in the way, but we’re back on the beam. Luckily, the damage wasn’t too great, as I have remained active.

Weight — Up2.5 lbs from week 4 (251.5 from 249)

Wii Age — I’m at 37, which is down from my last two reading of 45 and 55.

My balance and endurance has been clearly improving. I believe that stems from my concentration on the obstacle course, as that contains a jumping motion and gives a pretty decent 2-5 minute workout per run.

Making good and steady progress. I’ve made higher and higher scores on some of the multi-player games, but unfortunately I can’t seem to save and track my ongoing progress on those. Of course, my son regularly humiliates me on the snowball fights so maybe I should be grateful for no tracking!

Weight — Down 4.5 lbs from week 2 (249 from 253.5)

Wii Age — I’m still at 55, though the missing week’s age turned out to be 45.

The balance tests are still a bit of a problem. I’m standing straighter — my center of balance is just about in the middle now — but I still have some issues w/ shifting my weight. Also, I find that my right leg is feeling the workouts more. There clearly was something I missed in rehabbing from my long-ago broken pelvis.

I’m using the games to get some basic endurance and balance improvements underway. I notice the difference already in the pace that I can keep up in my 1/4 – 1/3 walk to my office from the parking lot.

Finally, I’ve started the WiiFit strength training. This has put some pressure on my balance issues, as the calisthenics in the program need me to balance on one leg often!

I was about to post on how unreliable performance reporting — progress, status, and forecast — is one of the first signs of project trouble. However, I realized that I hadn’t posted on my own “Operation Dunk 2010” performance, so here goes:

Also, I forgot to mention that I’ve started work on my balance and coordination capability with my Wii Fit. There is a basic balance test that combines with my BMI to give me a Wii Age. That’s probably as good a proxy for balance and coordination improvements as any, so it will be KPI #2.

I’ve found that the packaged application and custom development fields make at least some nod to standard project management practices. No doubt there are many suboptimal practitioners, but few ignore or openly bad mouth project management.

Infrastructure — servers, network, and desktop — appears to still be another matter. I’ve been shocked by how much expediting and Potemkin planning — plans that are only for show — I’ve seen in the last six months. One of the most frustrating practices is when IT Operations claims victory over useless milestones after having claimed that planning would have done nothing but slow them down.

Perhaps slowing down would prevent rework and wasted effort (by one’s customers!). For example, our service provider’s infrastructure team tried to get credit for server delivery. Except that the server was only powered on and connected to a network — it was far from “fit for use.” No one could access the network remotely — is it based in a data center after all — and even if they could potential users were then stymied by no log-on being set ups. Never mind that we couldn’t use the server anyway because it hadn’t been qualified (we’re in a FDA validated industry).

If you don’t own “fitness for use” as the underpinning of your deliverables, you aren’t managing your projects, you’re playing “whack-a-mole“.

Per my last full post, I want to re-build my capability to dunk. And to make sure that we all “know what done looks like”, by dunk I mean to dunk a men’s regulation basketball in a 10-foot goal by EOY 2010. As I broke down the work, there are at least three sub-capabilities I need to have:

Sufficient jumping ability to get my hands far enough above the rim.

Sufficient “ball skills” to dribble or manipulate the ball (so it can be in my hands far enough above the rim).

Sufficient balance and coordination to manage those two capabilities.

My dim memory of basic physics (see this site on vertical jump power), my awareness of my ever-expanding waistline, and multiple years of rust on my jumping muscles will have me focus on jumping ability first. This will involve reducing the amount of mass I’ll need to move — KPI #1 — and increasing the acceleration I can impart on that mass (not sure the KPI for this one yet).

BTW: The KPI #1 baseline is 261 lbs as of 1/4/2010. I have a Q1 target at home, but I don’t have it handy (probably in the 240’s).

This post may court the Business Week curse, but I’m highlighting this story on BI and the recession (here) as the jumping off point for a couple of observations. Rob T.’s comment in the piece (sorry, but I can’t link directly) notes that:

Unlike ERP, BI can be implemented step-wise, first in targeted, strategic areas, and then using a broad brush once it’s value has been proven. A wise strategy for this economy is to start small, pick a problem or area where a quick win is possible and attack it with a 60-90 day effort.

I mentioned this opportunity for short, focused projects in my WSJ interview. These short cycle times and the nature of BI work pose problems for traditional ERP change control and deliverables definition.

For example. what exactly is “done” on a BI project? The traditional ERP definition of deliverables — focused on processes that deliver tangible, measureable outcomes (e.g., Order to Cash, Purchase to Pay, Hire to Retire) — doesn’t work well for BI. Typically, reporting projects focused on # of reports, explicitly defined. Also, in analytics projects those reports or queries often spark more ideas for how data can be cross-tabbed, projected, etc. Do you always want to be presenting a change orders for new reports?

What has worked for you when defining deliverables and change control for BI initiatives? Now if you’ve read this blog for a while, then you can guess that I’m in tune attacking these issues with a capabilities-focused approach to deliverables. This approach points one in the right direction when defining what done looks like. However, many PMs find it hard to grok the requirements and required capabilities of analytics-savvy stakeholders and consultants.